Already Dead: A California Gothic Read Online Free Page B

now again!”
    Melissa lived with the Sheep Queen close to the Garcia River and was known to be screwing Nelson Fairchild, an alcoholic pot-grower, very rich. She probably did drive by this house every day, back and forth from the sunken barnyard where the Sheep Queen kept her bleating ragged flock.
    She clutched him tightly around the neck, hanging two feet above 18 / Denis Johnson

    the dirt floor, onto which he tossed her Indian silk pantaloons after stripping them from her legs. He let her keep the white T-shirt and turban.
    “Your light in here makes a dome in the fog. It’s soft.” She kissed him again. “I want to float inside.”
    The Sheep Queen made a practice of rescuing these types and taking them in and looking after them until they died or went completely crazy. Well, he was going to jane this psychotic skinny waif. She probably had two dozen diseases but we’re none of us born to perfection.
    In order to get hard he had to think of Yvonne. He pictured her naked in the lotus position. It was pornographic when she did that. Arousing not because it was obscene, but because he himself was obscene. He moved Melissa up and down on himself and right away she started, it seemed, to climax repeatedly. For his part he sensed with despair that he wouldn’t come, no matter how long they kept at it. But this activity made him happy, he could stand here all night and offer pleasure to this other human being, this creature of form and flesh crying like an anvil. Not, however, in this atmosphere. The forge’s draft had failed and the place was thick with sulfurous clouds and heat. His eyes burned with the fumes. Melissa was crying out but also coughing. She leaned back in his embrace. Tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re screwing in hell! We’re screwing in hell!” she screamed. But Frankenstein was thinking of Yvonne. Why didn’t she love him anymore? Why did he love her more than ever?
    He carried Melissa outside into the dampness and dark. “I can breathe!” she said, and did so several times deeply. She put her face against his chest, and he felt her lick some sweat from his nipple. She offered her opinion: “It tastes like madness.” He put her down. She yipped when her feet touched the dewy lawn, and then she stood trembling in the yellow light from the shop’s doorway.
    He stepped back inside for a second and brought her her pants all bunched up. “Matter of fact,” he said, “the hot tub isn’t functioning.”
    “Oh? Does it have a hole?”
    “I thought some enemies of mine were hiding inside it.”
    “Oh, those crazy old enemies,” she said as she got on her pants, bending over and diminishing in the bit of light, looking like small ivory.
    “What’s that accent? Where are you from?”
    “I’m Austrian.”
    Already Dead / 19

    “Like Hitler.”
    “Yes. And many great poets and philosophers.”
    “Wittgenstein?”
    “I don’t know their names.”
    She put on her thongs, kissed him, and left right away. For that he was grateful.
    Before dawn the fire in the forge had died, and Frank lay in his small bedroom sleepless, or worse, lay dreaming that he couldn’t sleep.
    He listened carefully to the walls…Nothing. Tonight he had fashioned, from six pounds of rebar, a small flat three-ounce paperweight.
    Two visitors in one day, each of them arguably more batshit than himself. The German, or whatever she was, was goofy. But he liked her, and maybe he’d see her again if he didn’t perish first of cocaine or Yvonne. As for Van Ness: just another ghost in another dream. And uglier than ever with his magnified eyes and that Kung Fu mustache like jungle vines. Frank felt sure that Van Ness had materialized here in the role of a demon—but not, thank goodness, one of mine, he thought. This time it’s somebody else who’s conjured him. I was fed up years ago, weary and sick of the power the world gives us to create entities like Van Ness.
    His own demons whispered from behind the walls and